Posts Tagged ‘Ukkraine’

Russia has returned to its bullying, autocratic ways. Its arguments and actions in Crimea are the same as it used in invading Hungary in 1956 to put down the Uprising and sending tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring.

Now as then, Russia (at the time the Soviet Union) disagrees with a government brought to power by a popular revolt in a neighbouring country, and for no other reason feels justified in launching a military invasion.

Having been a correspondent in Eastern Europe in the Cold War, I vividly remember the loathing of the local populations for the occupying Russians who foisted on them oppression and poverty.

I also recall the euphoria after the enlightened Russian Mikhail Gorbachev set about democratising Russian society and in doing so ended the Cold War and released hundreds of millions of people from the fear of nuclear annihilation.

Now the ex-KGB Vladimir Putin has reverted to the Russian norm. I hear the “explanations” that Crimea once belonged to Russia, as if that justifies trampling over treaties it freely entered into.

I hear the “realistic” assessments that there is little the West or anyone else can do. That may be true but they are weasel words, excuses for failing to take a personal stand against wrong. I remember how my German mother took a stand against the Nazis and paid the price. I prefer her courage in a fight she was bound to lose than the comfortable evasions of the realists.

It may be useless, but I am angry and proud of it. I do not accept that in the long term might will prove right. In the meantime, I wait to hear one Russian voice raised in dissent.